Pentagon to test ability to shoot down North Korean missiles

by Loren Pratt on 21/04/2017

The U.S. has expressed outrage at a series of missile and nuclear tests by Pyongyang, and North Korean leader Kim has been equally critical of a massive military exercise involving hundreds of thousands of South Korean and U.S. troops.

"We'll be conducting more missile tests on a weekly, monthly and yearly basis", Vice Foreign Minister Han Song Ryol told the BBC on Monday.

Vice President Mike Pence, visiting the demilitarized zone on Monday, said the U.S. had no more strategic patience with North Korea was considering military force against the regime.

North Korea unveiled footage Tuesday of a simulated nuclear strike on a USA city to celebrate a major national holiday.

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence warned Monday in Seoul the "era for strategic patience is over".

"I would see such an action as escalatory, but I couldn't guess how Kim Jong-un would interpret it", the report quoted Abraham Denmark, a senior official in Barack Obama's administration, as saying.

Lu Kang, a spokesman of the ministry, said at a briefing, "China objects to any words that could heighten tensions since the current situation on the Korean Peninsula is highly complicated and sensitive".

New ballistic missiles were displayed in a flamboyant military parade as Kim showed off the strength of the North Korean army. North Korea is already the lowest spending of all the world's nuclear states, and given its perceptions of its security environment, the nuclear programme is likely to be one of the last areas in which it would cut spending too.

South Korea's Ahn has pointed out that North Korea has continually refused to come to the negotiating table and has instead enshrined its status as a nuclear state in its constitution.

Pence's advisers said the vice-president would seek to make the case to Abe and Aso that the USA rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, under Trump did not signal a US withdrawal from trade and economic development in the region.

Official sources from South Korea and the United States confirmed North Korea had attempted to launch a missile on Sunday, but had failed. Last week Trump warned darkly that if his China outreach fails, the North "will be taken care of" by the United States and its allies.

Pyongyang is thought to be plotting to attempt a nuclear bomb test on April 25 - next Tuesday - to coincide with Military Foundation Day.

The unannounced visit at the start of Pence's 10-day trip to Asia was a USA show of force that allowed him to gaze at North Korean soldiers from afar and stare directly across a border marked by razor wire. "Very powerful. We have submarines, very powerful, far more powerful than the aircraft carrier, that I can tell you", Trump told Fox Business Network, specifying that the deployment was part of the USA response to Pyongyang's "provocations". After employing a tough posture toward China on the campaign trail, President Trump is taking a softer tone as he tries to encourage the Chinese to put pressure on the North Korean nuclear program. A number of municipalities are testing community alarm systems and planning evacuation drills as concerns run high around US military bases.

Western as well as South Korean understandings of North Korea's future are shaped strongly by the German experience and of a general notion of the illegitimacy of the North Korean state and the desirability of its collapse.

The North regularly launches short-range missiles, but is also developing mid-range and long-range missiles meant to target USA troops in Asia and, eventually, the US mainland.